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July 2024 Retrospective

The Good

Delicious in Dungeon

I finished watching the first season of Delicious in Dungeon on Netflix. It is a refreshing departure from typical fantasy animes that are all about defeating the big bad who is intent on destroying the entire world for undeniably evil reasons. Delicious in Dungeon just focuses on a small group of friends trying to save one of their own while cooking delicious meals for each other along the way. I know it sounds boring but if anything happened to Senshi I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.

Bouldering

One of the things I enjoyed most about my time in San Francisco was that I was always within a walkable distance of a bouldering gym. Three days a week I would wake up at 6:30am, walk down to the gym, climb the walls with some friends for 60-90 minutes, and then head home to shower before going into work. That routine was absolutely phenomenal and got me in the best shape of my life when coupled with running 15+ kilometres every week.

When the pandemic hit the biggest thing that I lost was that routine. From April 2020 to June 2024 I did not set foot in a bouldering gym once. But as luck would have it there are two climbing gyms within a 15 minute drive from my new home. Elsie and I signed up for some monthly memberships and have been hitting them up three times a week. We will both admit that we are horribly out of shape but are already seeing decent progress and hope to get back to crushing V5s in the near future.

Honourable Mentions

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

I watched The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare on Amazon Prime Video this month and it is a solid, turn your brain off, action film. It is not going to win any awards and I probably wouldn't be happy if I had spent money to see it in theatres. But it was the perfect sort of Sunday night film to just wind down the week.

Clean Your Fridge

Just a little PSA for everyone out there who thinks their fridge doesn't need regular cleaning. The house I bought has a very nice, expensive fridge that is just over two years old and in my bored, unemployed state I figured it could use a cleaning. That's how I ended up removing the vegetable crisper and discovering that the entire top of it was covered in mold. So consider putting down whatever you are reading this on and heading over to your fridge for a quick peek.

Will and Power of Attorney documents

Another PSA for those who think they are not old enough for a will. It is safe to assume most people reading this won't have any crazy requirements and just want their estate divided up amongst their family members. Stop procrastinating and just get that in writing so you can easily update it as the years progress.

I know a lot of people are thinking "I'm going to be dead so who really cares?" but this is not about you. It is about making the lives of the people you're leaving behind easier. A will and power of attorney documents are easily drawn up by almost any lawyer so just get it done to ensure the government isn't fighting your family over your corpse.

The Bad

The Bear Season 3

Season 1 of The Bear was a nearly perfect season of television. All of the episodes build on one another and even though the season ends on a cliffhanger it doesn't leave you asking a ton of questions. You know what is about to happen and you're just excited to see how it will play out.

Seasons 2 falters a bit but was still enjoyable. The romance subplots are pointless and there are numerous stand-alone episodes (while still fantastic) that could have been dropped and barely affect the overall story. Just like the first season we end on a cliffhanger but we're not desperate for the answers to any questions. We know where the show has to go next and just want to see it.

Unfortunately the success and accolades the first two seasons received appear to have gone to the writers and producers heads because season 3 of The Bear is a pretentious mess. You could edit it down to 1/3 of its length and lose absolutely none of the story because there almost is none. The characters are effectively in the same position at the end of the season as they were at the beginning. In fact the only progression any of them make are actually regressions where they become unbearable assholes that I cannot bring myself to care about. Character motivations appear to have gone out the window and we're just focusing on what uncommunicative pieces of shit they all are. The only characters I can appreciate anymore are the affable "losers" who get scared when mommy and daddy start yelling at one another. The best way to describe season 3 is that it feels like a filler arc for an anime that has surpassed the manga it is adapting.

The Bear is very close to becoming the best example of a TV show that needs to end in four seasons or less before they jump the shark and become a complete joke. At this point I don't even think I'm going to watch the fourth season of The Bear unless someone whose opinion I respect says the writing has rebounded. Otherwise I can think of a much better way to spend 5+ hours of my time.

Argylle

Even though I watched it for "free" on Apple TV+, I feel like Argylle stole something from me. Nothing in this film makes sense if you think about it for more than 10 seconds and every action scene is the type of garbage CGI nonsense we were inundated with the in mid 2000s with films like Γ†on Flux and Ultraviolet.

Matthew Vaughn seems to have gone the same route as Zac Sydner where their core ideas are interesting but there are no adults in the room to tell them that their execution is complete trash.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

I am not a fan of the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for Elden Ring because it is a much more punishing and linear open world game than the original.

In the base game I spent 60+ hours roaming the open world, stumbling upon all sorts of captivating areas and enemies, before I finally decided it was time to attempt to defeat the final boss. In Shadow of the Erdtree I accidentally rushed though the "main story" and got to the final area in less than 8 hours. I wouldn't have had an issue with this if I hadn't also locked myself out of dozens of side quests. I was no longer able to experience most of the DLC "correctly" because somehow I had done things out of order.

The final straw was when I looked up a map of the DLC and realized I had somehow only explored 20% of it. I tried to find out how to access the other areas but they're all hidden behind esoteric puzzles or in random, uninteresting caves off the beaten path. Eventually I snapped and resorted to looking up guides on YouTube. In the base Elden Ring I never used a single guide because the world was so perfectly designed that just by heading in the general direction of an undiscovered area you would almost always uncover how to access it.

The cherry on top is that the toxic "git gud" attitude of FromSoftware games also returns in this DLC. The designers appear to have taken the lazy way out and made the game harder by simply increasing the damage and number of attacks that enemies do. In the base game you'd be memorizing three hit combos before the enemy would expose themselves to a counterattack for a second or two. In the DLC you're dodging six hit combos that leave the enemy open for 300 milliseconds before they perform an area-of-effect attacks that covers a 270 degree radius.

I want to be very clear that I do not think the DLC for Shadow of the Erdtree is poorly designed. I can completely understand how some people would enjoy it. I actually subscribe to a lot of YouTubers who do challenge runs of Elden Ring and watching Bushy and LilAggy absolutely break the game is a ton of fun. But I enjoyed Elden Ring because it finally broke the mould of FromSoftware games and rewarded players for exploring, not just banging their head against a wall trying to defeat a boss. This DLC broke that contract with me and since I had just finished playing 44+ hours of the original game to get ready for the DLC, the disconnect was all the more jarring.

My final critique is that I had the exact same problem with the final boss of Shadow of the Erdtree as I did with the base game. For this playthrough I used a two-handed, strength build and while I definitely had to swap out the type of two-handed sword to beat some bosses, I was always able to find a solution. For the final boss there was no solution for two handed strength builds, at least not that I could discern. After spending more time summoning my helpers than actually attempting the boss I just looked up a "correct" way to beat him. It was hide behind a shield and poke the boss with a rapier. I literally went from being this two handed brute who charged directly at their enemy to a child hiding behind a shield poking the big bad guy to death. Killed him in only four tries.

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